Dependency Graph

• This diagram represents the Graph of Dependencies beetween the C/C++ Projects of your application.
• This static diagram can be useful but it is just a coarse view of your application architecture.
• It is recommended to use the CppDepend interactive dependency Graph and interactive Dependency Matrix for an in-depth exploration of the actual architecture of your code.
  

Online documentation:

• CppDepend Interactive Dependency Graph
• CppDepend Interactive Dependency Matrix

Dependency Matrix

• This diagram represents the DSM (Dependency Structure Matrix) beetween the C/C++ Projects of your application.
• The Dependency Matrix is a compact way to represent and navigate across dependencies between components.
• The number on cells of the Dependency Matrix included in the report, represent the number of types involved in the coupling
• It is recommended to use the CppDepend interactive dependency Graph and interactive Dependency Matrix for an in-depth exploration of the actual architecture of your code.

Online documentation:

• CppDepend Interactive Dependency Matrix
• CppDepend Interactive Dependency Graph

Visualizing Code Metrics through Treemaping

• In this Metric View, the code base is represented through a Treemap.
• Treemapping is a method for displaying tree-structured data by using nested rectangles.
• In the present treemap, each rectangle represents a method and the area of a rectangle is proportional to the number of lines of code of the corresponding method.

With the Online documentation, understand how Treemaping can help you see patterns in your code base, that would be hard to spot with other ways.

• Visualizing Code Metrics with Treemap

Abstractness versus Instability Diagram

The Abstractness versus Instability Diagram helps to detect which Projects are potentially painful to maintain (i.e concrete and stable) and which Projects are potentially useless (i.e abstract and instable).

• Abstractness: If a project contains many abstract types (i.e interfaces and abstract classes) and few concrete types, it is considered as abstract.
  
• Stability: A project is considered stable if its types are used by a lot of types from other Projects. In this context stable means painful to modify.

Online documentation:

• Definitions of related Code Metrics

For beginners: Where to start

• Search for unwanted dependencies.
• Look for complex methods listed through the standard Rule Quick Summary of methods to refactor.
• Inspect other standard Rules that were violated.
• See how standard Rules are written and customize some Rules to your needs.
• Look at Code Metrics definitions to see how Code Metrics can help increase code quality.
• Use the Code Diff feature to review code changes (pro edition only).
• Import test coverage data to assess possible improvements in your testing strategy (pro edition only).

Code queries and rules results are truncated to list a maximum of 100 code elements in this report

• It is recommended to use the CppDepend interactive UI capabilities to browse a large list of code elements matched.
• To enable or disable this setting, there is a tickbox labelled Don't show more than 100 matched items for a Rule violated in the CppDepend Project Properties panel > Report tab > Avoid too big report for large code base section
• This setting is enabled by default to avoid to have too large reports when analyzing large code bases.

Does this report gets too large?

• There is a setting enabled by default to avoid to have too large reports when analyzing large code bases.
• To enable or disable this setting, there is a tickbox labelled Don't show more than 100 matched items for a Rule violated in the CppDepend Project Properties panel > Report tab > Avoid too big report for large code base section
• It is recommended to use the CppDepend interactive UI capabilities to browse a large list of code elements matched.

Quick Tips

• In addition to the CppDepend report, use the interactive UI through the standalone executable VisualCppDepend.exe, or through the Visual Studio CppDepend Addin.
• With the interactive UI, browse more detailed data and have Rules checking updated each time the code is modified and recompiled.
• The analysis execution and the report options are configurable through the interactive UI, in the panel Project Properties.
• Plain HTML report (single HTML page, no javascript, no menu) is also available.
• Full CppDepend documentation is available on the CppDepend website under the Documentation menu.